They won't; as hardware gets older, it drops in price. That means last year's $1000 gaming PC is likely half that price today. I think the article is more stressing the fact that more expensive hardware in a console equals a more expensive console. One of the biggest perks of console gaming is the cheap hardware, but if platform developers decide to compete with current gen PC's, they'd have to raise the price point on the consoles significantly to put the necessary parts in it.

What will happen, you will have 500-600usd PCs beating consoles in performance. While consoles will cost 400usd.

The catch here is the same 500-600usd PC will be able to run every game bought on your last PC. Yet with consoles u will lose your entire library. In those terms id say PC easily wins in terms of costing, not to mention every new game bought on PC will be cheaper. Hell some of us probably wont need to upgrade to beat the next consoles in terms of performance.

@knight_crawler

Upgradable consoles aren't going to happen. The reason why it happen because consoles use proprietary parts, which dont fit normal PCs. Hence the demand for those parts will be no where close to their PC counterparts example Ram, CPUs, motherboards etc. All these parts on the PC arent just used for gaming PCs, they are also used for normal office PCs. Hence The cost goes down. Since the console versions will be just built for the consoles. Demand will be much less. Hence due to low production levels the cost will be too much, it will cost more than PC counterparts. Hence you might as well get a PC in the end.

Don't forget you get to save a tonne of money from all the great discounts and offers from games sold on Steam & GOG. If you can wait a while and not buy day-1 games, your savings on PC games far outweighs the initial extra cost of buying a PC compared to a console. Furthermore, the visuals on PC puts consoles to shame.

bringing out a console with PC specs and upgradable to boot? What you are saying or suggesting is that MS is going to go the old Apple route and release PC's using custom parts... You do see how well that worked out for Apple right? And MS has a bout the same presence as Apple did int he PC gaming market.

They gave away any advantage they had in the PC gaming market when they abandoned it and I seriously doubt they have enough pull left to have any kind of impact ont he PC market regardless of what they release.

@Dude - Not if Sony also decides to adapt the same method, then developers will have to do it.

@Wii - When you think about it MS is already doing selling cutome parts for the 360, you have to use MS hard drives in order to upgrade memory.

The 720 is guranteed to have PC software heavly integrated into it as MS want the 720 to be your one stop media device for your every day use, the question is how similiar will the hardware be to a PC.

Not really, a good gaming rig has always costed 500-1200$ if you know where to look, people are stuck in a mentality that gaming PCs are 3k+ because of the overpriced alienwares and what most ignorant people say. And also people think building a PC is hard when it will take you little time.

Come on, you know that's not entirely true. You're average joe is not going to know what kind of processor and RAM is compatible with a certain motherboard, or finding the power consumption on full load to determine your PSU. Not only that but you have to make sure the parts you buy comes from a solid company. You don't want to buy a rocketfish PSU from Best Buy do you? There are so many different variations out there.

Building the PC itself doesn't take long, what's time consuming is the amount of research involved in making sure you have the right pieces for the kind of computer you want. Some people just don't want to do that so they save time and purchase a pre-built PC or a console.

I don't think so. If you look at PC exclusives vs. Console exclusives you have totally different games. On PC you have League of Legends, Diablo and RTS games. On Colsoles you have God of War, Little Big Planet, Party games like Mario Party and so on. They are aiming for different target groups so I wouldn't really say they are even competing.

If exclusives like the ones you listed were the deciding factor, wouldn't that imply PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii aren't competing? PC is competition for consoles because it gets most of the same multiplat titles. XCOM, Dishonored, Borderlands 2, Black Ops 2, and most of the other big titles this season are on PC as well as console.

My current PC probably has double the GPU performance of the next gen consoles (based on leaked specs) yet will be lucky to yield similar results due to consoles unified hardware allowing much greater software optimisation.

PC will always give you more, but at a premier, it's only later into each console cycle will the PC offer better results at a reasonable cost.

That's ignoring the myriad of other uses for a PC mind you which often make that extra investment worthwhile.

there is another reason why people don't pc game and the reason why I don't and its not price or effort of making a gaming pc as none of these is an issue for me but rather keyboard and mouse set up. many gamers that started on consoles don't like key board and mouse and I know you can plug a 360 pad into them now but that defetes the point of pc gaming, console gaming can be more expensive if you need to upgrade your tv. I've pre ordered a Wii u. at 350 pounds and brought a new full hd tv with 3d to replace my hd ready set up at 700. I know I could make a gaming pc with a high res moniter for that price but I prefer the plug in and play set up.

There have always been PCs. There have always been consoles. Console always win. Why? Convenience.

PCs aren't used for games for the occasional Call of Duty gamer. PC gaming is largely a nerdy thing to do.

Next-gen PS4/720 will launch at no more than $400. These consoles will kill a $400 PC. Developers will learn to make full use of these consoles and we will have games on $250 consoles that look better than those on a $600 PC in a few years.

Since the last console came out the dollar has devalued by 2/3rds. That's why a $269 video card now comes out at $500-600. See GTX 680 at launch.

The dollar WILL continue to be devalued for fraud. We have 1.4 quadrillion in worthless derivatives bets (that's what they really bailed out in 2008) tied to your bank deposits for collateral. Every major bank in the U.S., and pretty much the world is broke 50-400x over.

So prices will continue to go up. Instead of collapse the fraud or rescue your deposits through reimposing Glass-Steagall legislation, they are creating digital money and handing it out to the fraudsters. Doesn't matter who wins today, Wall Street frauds win either way. America loses. British empire wins.

So yeah tech on this level will get more expensive.

Then you have how things are being multiples of themselves. Dual gpus/sli-crossfire, 2 cores-4 cores-6-8...dual 8 core, etc. This will continue and expand.

Sure tech generally gets less expensive as it ages, but each time it is initially introduced, the costs for that are going up, up, UP. So they start decreasing from a higher level. The situation is ripe for that starting condition to go sky high. There already is more money printed than there was that caused Weimar, Germany.

So off of price and onto 'threat'. I don't see the PC as a threat to consoles, I see of it as a constant kick in the butt pushing things forward. Where would the consoles be if DX11 hadn't been used on the PC the past ~3 years? We'd still be waiting on them, their first implementations, and all the time it takes to really use them would be ahead of us, not behind us.

It's also pretty silly when you consider most gamers that grew up with gaming say 25-40 age range had both consoles and PC's. So why are people going to want one or the other now? Besides money of course. No one is going to choose to have one or the other. They'll want both, like they've always had. They offer similar but different experiences, add redundancy in case one breaks down or becomes obsolete, etc.

Besides, the devs mostly code for the consoles. Some will code for PC first. Some will code for consoles and PC, and build new features on top of what they do for the consoles. A good example is how lots of games added DX11 and higher res textures on top of the console game for the PC version the last few years.

So I don't see PC's as a threat but complimentary. I don't see most Dev's wanting to jump ship and couldn't afford to if they wanted to. Consoles as the author said are indeed cheaper, standardized, and you know how many consoles can actually run your game.